House & Villa Rentals

House & Villa Rentals

Unless you are springing for a suite, a regular hotel is often a lousy place to spend a week, especially for a family. It’s cramped, you don’t have a full kitchen, and you’re tripping over each other and your belongings. It can make a lot more sense to rent a house, a vacation villa, or a condo instead. Then you’ve got plenty of room to stretch out, you can cook away, and you’ll feel like you own the place.

Villa & House Rental Links

Home Away Vacation Rentals is a portal of several sites offering rentals of all types. Combined it has some 100,000 listings in the U.S. and 90 other countries.VacationRentals.com is an established site that the author of this book has used as both a renter and a landlord.Vacation Home Rentals is organized enough to offer special discounted villas and vacation condos each week.VRBO stands for “vacation rentals by owner.”PerfectPlaces.com has listings around the world.

Yogomogo features holiday rentals and property for sale advertised by owners across Europe.

SlowTrav.com is an actual community of people who would like us all to slow down and chill out in one place for a while–has 4,000 reviews of rentals.

Most of these are direct rentals from homeowners though, so if you would prefer to deal with an office that handles multiple properties, you need to go local. This is especially true in prime beach rental locations and in popular spots in Europe. Ask for recommendations from someone who has done it already when possible. Sometimes guidebooks can help, but your best bet is usually to set aside some time to do a web search (“villa rentals” Tuscany for instance) and start sifting through the results. After a while you’ll have a good sense of prices and can tell what’s a decent value or not.